Storms return as ComEd works to restore power for thousands

Severe storms that rolled through Northern Illinois left a just under 70,000 people without power.

Staff report

June 25, 2013 | 2:23 p.m.

While ComEd works to restore power to the thousands of customers who lost it during Monday's powerful storms, another storm has been slowly making its way in our direction.

That new storm is strong enough that the National Weather Service has issued a severe thunderstorm watch until 10 p.m. for most of Central Illinois, including Grundy, Kankakee, Kendall and Will counties in the Chicago-area.

The agency had earlier issued a flash flood watch through Wednesday evening for the entire region as rain continued to fall though much of the day Tuesday. The agency said that the storms expected to hit the area later today and tomorrow could drop as much as 1-2 inches of rain per hour.

According to ComEd, there were about 44,000 customers without service as of 3:30 p.m. In the southern part of the area, 34,000 customers remained without power from the storm that started to hit the area about 5 p.m. Monday. About 5,000 were without power in Chicago, 3,300 in the north suburban area, and 1,700 in the west suburban area.

At its peak, about 300,000 customers were affected, according to ComEd spokesperson Martha Swaney.

Swaney said that high winds with speeds as high as 75 m.p.h. knocked down tree branches — whole trees in some places — and took wires with them, the primary causes for the outages.

Swaney said that more than 650 crews are out working to restore power.